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How to Localize your Website

Written by: Bill Golden

Article Overview: There are many websites around who offer local or regional services. Yours may be one of them. When someone uses a search engine to find someone offering products or services similar to yours, will they find you? Let’s explore the concept of localizing your website.

How to Localize your Website

There are many websites around who offer local or regional services. Yours may be one of them. When someone uses a search engine to find someone offering products or services similar to yours, will they find you? Let’s explore the concept of localizing your website.

What is Localizing your Website? Localizing means optimizing your website for your specific locale and surrounding communities or area. Part of this optimization is to weave your locales into your website content. This is a little tricky since it can appear unnatural if you use your locale in your content too many times in succession or if your local reference is our of place (text too large, for example). Some companies identify their local in very large letters using very large header h1 and h2 tags. This can be viewed as a good thing by search engine, but it sure looks tacky.

You have to be creative about how you use your locale names within your website. Here are the techniques you can use to make your website more “localized.

Identify your Locales. The first thing you should do is get a map or a listing of every town that is near you and out to the edge of your service area. You should include even the smallest communities. For Central Ohio, there are close to 50 small communities that can be part of a regional locale.

Make your Primary Focus your Larger Locale. Say you live in a small suburb at the edge of a major city. In the case of Columbus, Ohio, you may be based in a suburb, Hilliard, Ohio, but your customers may come from all over Central Ohio. It is better to focus on Columbus, Ohio since that is what most people in the area will enter when doing a search. You can make Hilliard, Ohio come out is your general content areas.

Use your Locales Well. You can make mention of your primary locale on your page Title line, in your page comments Alt and Title tags, file names, and of course, occasionally as part of your main content. Remember that h1, h2, and b tags can generate higher search engine points because those tags scream “this is important because it is bolded text.” Try not to use a locale reference more than about 3-5% of the time, in terms of overall page content. There is a very useful utility on the Website Optimization Services page of my website that will analyze all words on a given page and generate a percentage breakdown report as to how many times a word is used on a given page.

Put your Regional Locales Down in the “Fine Print.” This is a great technique that I use quite regularly. I get my list of 50-some local communities and, way down in the footer area of the page, say something like, :Proudly serving these fine Central Ohio communities” and then I list nearly every community in Central Ohio in this footer area. This text is way off the main body of the page, so it doesn’t reflect negatively on your website. Even if search engines don’t value this area of your web page they will still see it and, since other are not doing this, you stand a great chance of moving up in the rankings.

I have a client who added these very small towns to the bottom of his web pages and he recently received some new business because someone in one of these small towns queried their small town in Google. This worked because it is a somewhat unique town name and also because no one else is coding their web pages with those same small towns listed on the web page.

If you would like to see some examples, get in contact with me via my website and I will forward some actual client links and additional information as to how well it works for them. It’s time to localize your website!

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Article Tags: engine, Google, localize, search, search engine, web, website



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